Who are the Māori?
They crossed the Pacific a century before Columbus, signed a treaty the British broke, and built the world’s most watched Indigenous renaissance.
Last updated: October 2026
The Māori are the Indigenous Polynesian people of Aotearoa — New Zealand — descendants of voyagers who crossed the Pacific around 1300 CE. Today numbering nearly 900,000, about 17 percent of New Zealand’s population, they stand at the center of one of the world’s most closely watched experiments in Indigenous rights and reconciliation.
The Māori are the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, and their story begins with one of the greatest feats of navigation in human history. Their ancestors were Polynesians, seafarers who had settled the islands of the tropical Pacific over thousands of years, sailing double-hulled canoes across open ocean by reading the stars, the winds, the currents, the flight of birds, and the colour of the sea. In Māori tradition, the ancestral homeland is Hawaiki, a place that lives in story and song, and the first great navigator is Kupe, who is said to have sailed to Aotearoa and returned to tell of a long, white cloud, Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud.
Archaeology and oral tradition agree on the broad shape of the settlement. The ancestors of the Māori reached Aotearoa around the thirteenth century CE, in a planned migration in ocean-going canoes, waka, carrying the plants and animals they would need: kumara, sweet potato, taro, dogs, and rats. They found a land unlike any they had known: cooler, larger, and full of birds, including the giant flightless moa, which they hunted, and which was extinct within a few centuries of their arrival. The settlers adapted with remarkable speed, learning to store kumara through the winter, to fish new waters, and to build a society fitted to a temperate land.
Over the centuries, the settlers became the Māori, a distinct people with their own language, customs, and identity. The word Māori itself originally meant ordinary or normal, and it came into use to distinguish the Indigenous people from the Europeans who arrived later. Māori society was organised into whānau, extended families, hapū, sub-tribes, and iwi, tribes, each with its own territory, chiefs, and history. The tribes traced their descent, whakapapa, back to the crews of the founding canoes, and whakapapa, genealogy, remains the spine of Māori identity: to know who you are is to know who you descend from.
Māori culture is built around a set of concepts that are hard to translate but essential to understand. Mana is prestige, authority, and spiritual power, held by people, by tribes, and by places. Tapu is sacredness and restriction, the state of being set apart, which governs what can be touched, eaten, or entered. Tikanga is the right way of doing things, the customs and protocols that order daily life. Manaakitanga is hospitality, the obligation to care for guests. Whanaungatanga is kinship, the web of relationships that binds people together. Together they form te ao Māori, the Māori world, a way of seeing the world in which people, ancestors, land, and the natural world are bound together.
Te reo Māori, the Māori language, is a Polynesian language, closely related to the languages of Tahiti, Hawaii, and the Cook Islands. It is a language of oratory, song, and proverb, and its great formal occasions, the welcome ceremony on the marae, the meeting ground, are built from speech, song, and gesture. The marae is the heart of Māori communal life: a fenced courtyard, a meeting house, wharenui, decorated with carvings and woven panels, and a dining hall. On the marae, visitors are welcomed with a pōwhiri, a ceremony of challenge, speeches, and song, and the dead are farewelled in tangihanga, funerals that can last for days. To be welcomed onto a marae is to be brought into the whānau, if only for a visit.
Māori art is among the most distinctive in the Pacific. Whakairo, carving, covers meeting houses, canoes, weapons, and ornaments with interlocking spirals and figures that record ancestors and stories. Tā moko, the tattooing of the face and body, is a mark of identity and status, cut into the skin with chisels rather than pricked with needles, and it carries a person’s genealogy and rank. Raranga, weaving, produces cloaks of feathers and flax, baskets, and mats of great beauty. Kapa haka, the performing arts, includes the haka, the posture dance made famous by the All Blacks rugby team, whose Ka Mate haka was composed by the Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha in the early nineteenth century. The haka is not a war dance alone: it is performed to welcome, to mourn, to challenge, and to celebrate.
The first Europeans to reach Aotearoa were Dutch. Abel Tasman sighted the west coast in 1642, in an encounter that ended in violence, and sailed away. James Cook charted the coastline in 1769 and 1770, and his visit opened the way for whalers, sealers, traders, and missionaries. The missionaries brought Christianity and literacy: Māori learned to read and write in their own language, and by the 1830s a substantial part of the Māori population was literate, one of the highest literacy rates in the world at the time. But the arrival of Europeans also brought disease, muskets, and a growing number of settlers who wanted land.
In 1840, the British Crown and more than five hundred Māori chiefs, rangatira, signed the Treaty of Waitangi, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands and then at other gatherings around the country. The treaty was written in two languages, and the two texts do not say the same thing. In the English text, the chiefs ceded sovereignty to the British Crown. In the Māori text, the chiefs granted the Crown kāwanatanga, governance, while retaining tino rangatiratanga, full chieftainship over their lands, villages, and treasures. The difference, between sovereignty and governance, has been the central dispute in New Zealand history ever since, and it is still argued in courts, in Parliament, and on marae today.
What followed the treaty was, for Māori, a century of loss. The Crown bought land, often on terms the sellers did not understand, and settlers poured in. In the 1860s, the New Zealand Wars broke out, a series of conflicts over land and sovereignty, and the Crown confiscated vast areas of Māori land, especially in Waikato, Taranaki, and the Bay of Plenty. The Native Schools Act of 1867 established a school system in which teaching was in English, and Māori children were, in many schools, punished for speaking their own language. By the end of the nineteenth century, Māori, who had been the overwhelming majority at the signing of the treaty, were a small minority in their own land, and some Pākehā, European New Zealanders, openly predicted that they would disappear. They were wrong.
Māori survived, and in the twentieth century they rebuilt. The Māori population, which had fallen to its lowest point around the turn of the century, began to grow again. In the decades after the Second World War, Māori moved in large numbers from rural villages to the cities, seeking work, and the urban migration broke old patterns of life while creating new ones. In the 1970s, a new generation of Māori activists, inspired by Indigenous and civil rights movements around the world, demanded that the treaty be honoured, that the language be saved, and that Māori culture be recognised as the foundation of New Zealand’s identity.
The renaissance had concrete achievements. In 1975, the Waitangi Tribunal was established to hear Māori claims that the Crown had breached the treaty, and in 1985 its powers were extended back to 1840, opening the way for settlements that returned land, money, and apologies to iwi. In 1982, the first Te Kōhanga Reo, language nests, opened, immersion preschools where children were taught entirely in Māori, and they were followed by Kura Kaupapa Māori, immersion schools. In 1987, the Māori Language Act made te reo Māori an official language of New Zealand, alongside English and, later, New Zealand Sign Language. In 2004, Māori Television began broadcasting, and in 2022 Matariki, the Māori New Year, marked by the rising of the Pleiades, became a public holiday.
The renaissance was cultural as well as political. Māori writers, including Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, and Patricia Grace, brought Māori stories to a world audience. Māori film, from Once Were Warriors to Whale Rider, reached millions. Māori artists, musicians, and designers built a contemporary culture that is rooted in tradition and unafraid of the present. The haka, once treated as a curiosity, is performed on the world’s sporting stages, and the pōwhiri, the welcome ceremony, is performed for visiting heads of state. Māori culture is no longer a relic: it is the public face of New Zealand.
Today, Māori are a large and growing part of New Zealand’s population, and Māori identity is a living, changing thing. Many Māori live in cities, speak English as their first language, and work in every profession, while maintaining ties to their iwi, their marae, and their whakapapa. Others live in rural communities where te reo is the language of daily life. Māori hold seats in Parliament, including the reserved Māori electorates established in 1867, sit on the Supreme Court, lead businesses, universities, and cultural institutions, and serve in the armed forces. Māori health, education, and justice outcomes still lag behind those of other New Zealanders, and closing those gaps is one of the country’s central political challenges.
The treaty remains the unfinished business of New Zealand. The settlements process, which has returned billions of dollars and large areas of land to iwi, is one of the most ambitious attempts anywhere in the world to reckon with colonial dispossession, and it is incomplete. The debate over the meaning of the treaty, over co-governance, and over the place of Māori language and culture in public life, continues. What is no longer in doubt is that Māori are not a vanishing people. They are the first people of Aotearoa, the tangata whenua, the people of the land, and their language, their art, and their claim to the treaty are at the centre of New Zealand’s national life. The canoes that crossed the Pacific eight centuries ago arrived, and their descendants are still here.
This entry draws on Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, the Waitangi Tribunal’s reports, the text of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the histories of Michael King and Ranginui Walker, and the work of the Māori Language Commission, Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori. Māori terms are given in the form used by those sources, with macrons as in te reo Māori.